The previous entry talks about my social transition - the summer before my senior year in high school I came out as transgender, cut my hair short, asked people to call me Alex, and began using "he, him, his" pronouns. This felt great and it also felt awkward: everyone around me knew I had been a girl, and I itched to get away from the context and history that I felt constrained me.
And this is where my story and Continental Divide are closest in their plot... the summer after my first year in college, I decided I had spent enough time on the East Coast - my whole life. My first year at Harvard had been challenging and confusing and wonderful. There was a great community of queer folks (though I was the only out transgender person) and a very active larger Boston queer community (with lots of out transgender folks) and I had good support from them. But even as I circulated in this environment, I wondered if I was really living as a man or if I was getting by on the sufferance of this hyper-liberal college and east coast bubble, where people were just being nice to me. I knew what I was... I knew how I wanted to be... and somehow being a trans-guy in Cambridge, Massachusetts wasn't sufficient (what can I say, I was 18 years old).
So I called around and got a job at a dude ranch in Wyoming, washing dishes. I was so excited. I'd never been out west... what was more masculine than Wyoming? Than a ranch? (Okay, it was a dude ranch. A "real" ranch would have been more masculine.) Once school was over in May, I headed out to Cody, Wyoming.
I was excited and I was terrified... when I started writing Continental Divide, I knew there were lots of details I wanted to change about Ron's backstory compared to mine and his experience in Wyoming compared to mine. But one thing I did want to keep the same was the constant tension I felt. Pulling on one side was this desire to prove myself - to be a man, in the stereotyped, heterosexual, American way - and the other side was to be myself - nerdy and queer - and be safe. It was pretty impossible.
I first tried writing about my time in Wyoming back in 2007 or so and eventually wrote a short essay titled "Sleeping Indian." There's a link to it below. I hadn't read it in an awfully long time... and it reads like I am just learning how to write (because I was), so please forgive me for that. Past that, however, it is amazing how many of the little details I put in this essay make their way into Continental Divide. So, think of this as a teaser for parts of the novel... and a good sense of how torn I felt: how much I wanted to be out there and prove myself, how scared I was.
http://www.conteonline.net/issue0402/indian01.shtml